Güney27 wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 7:07 pm
We are currently in the midst of Earth evolution, Saturn Sun and Moon are the states that are identified as involution as those are the "fall" or in other words the materialization of spirit.
Earth is the state of the material in which we gain self-awareness (and begin to classify everything intellectually and logically), and from here it's back towards spiritualization.
So the beginning and the end are the same.
This can then be symbolically packed into pictures. I think that's what you mean by symbolic thinking.
You mention symbolic thinking, can you tell the exact difference between symbolic thinking and
Explain intuitive thinking?
How exactly can one experience a text intuitively, through a conventional way of reading?
Guney,
I hope you have a chance to watch the video on mythology. What follows is a more conceptual angle on symbolic thinking. It is always helpful to combine our conceptual study with an experiential aspect as well and approach the essential core of intuitive experience from a few different angles. Some people are good at taking a single angle of inquiry and, through sheer strength of willpower, investigating until most of its core meaning is mined. For people like me who lack that singular focus, however, it may be better to circulate through a few different angles of approach on any given topic. What you describe above how the beginning and end are essentially the same is exactly right, but to really strengthen our intuition for this process we need to steer our thinking through the curvatures of meaning as much as possible. Our thinking investigation can actually come to resemble the Cosmic and Earthly involution and evolution in that sense, since the latter is of course teased apart into many aeons, ages, epochs, and so forth. That is the only way
inner perfection can arise as a result.
We are always thinking intuitively and we can get a somewhat clear sense of that in the experience of reading text or listening to music compared to other forms of outer experience. We can notice how the text does not present itself like most other outer objects, where the perceptual characteristics grab most of our attention. We don't get distracted following the curves of the black-and-white formations of text, but rather the text (in a language we have learned to resonate with) presents itself to us as a relatively meaningful whole. There is background intuition that everything we perceive audially or visually was structured through the ideational activity of other intelligent agents (including computer bots who were programmed by intelligent agents). That is even true of languages we haven't learned yet - we still have the intuition that we are confronting outer perceptions that have crystallized flowing intents. So we can leverage this intuition into gaining insight into the World as a whole.
A text isn't meant to be read intuitively, necessarily. Rather, we strive to become more conscious of how the text condenses from intuition into mental pictures, verbal concepts, and outer perceptions so that intuition can fulfill
another function, namely that of lucid, precise, and communicable understanding which further clarifies, expands, and strengthens the intuition. It is a process of
inner perfection. We should really try to sense how we are always engaged in this rhythmic process while reading through the text. Then we are able to increasingly maintain that intuition of the perfecting process in the background as we also understand the content of what was written. The normal intellect consistently loses the overall theme of the text/speech when analyzing its components, so it struggles to penetrate into deeper insights embedded within the speech. When we evolve our thinking on the path, however, it is like we are condensing what would take place over a much longer period of time into a relatively shorter period of time. Essentially, we are bringing more of our past experience and future potential - all of which is the intentional activity of human and higher beings - into the present. This is always what we are doing through the layers of our thinking, even if we are unaware of it, but higher thinking makes it more lucid and efficient by making it more conscious. Thus we can speak of someone on the initiatory path accomplishing in a single incarnation what would otherwise take 2, 3, or more incarnations.
But we should expect much more humble beginnings where, instead of reading through a spiritual text 10x to get its core insights, we only need to read it 4 or 5x to get those same insights. It all relates to increasing our resonance with the intentional structuring of the World content. We want to experience more and more of our states of being as a meaningful and archetypally structured Whole, like we do with speech and music, and to do that we must resonate with the intents that structure our existence. For example, if we are driving from point A to point B, the states of being through which we metamorphose will be constrained by the driving regulations that have been intentionally established i.e. speed limits, lane markings, stop signs, stoplights, and so forth. It is also constrained by the intentions of other drivers we share the road with. These intentions are not as transparent to us as our own intentions but they are relatively transparent because our ideational consciousness has a certain amount of resonance with the sort of activity that went into establishing the regulations. The driving regulations were, in turn, constrained by the natural landscape in which they were designed to apply, which is less transparent. Our metamorphosing states of being in the car from point A to point B will be constrained even more tightly by what we call the 'laws of nature' such as the force of gravity, but these are not at all transparent to our intuitive understanding, i.e. we can hardly resonate with the underlying activity. That is why we conceive of them as abstract and mechanical forces rather than the intentional ideational activity of concrete beings.
The first thing is always to begin differentiating the layers of our consciousness that are normally merged together. We don't need to worry about imaginatively or intuitively grasping a text or any particular outer perception like a tree, but rather seek to experientially awaken more and more to how our experience of the World's content is always intertwined with our variable modes of consciousness. In these differentiated modes of consciousness reside the intentional structuring of the Cosmos, of Nature, of Culture, and of our individual spirit-soul-body structure.
Steiner wrote:But that is not the only reason why I have referred to this perspective; it was also to call attention to the importance of noting the ways consciousness is related to the world and to the fact that we can come to know the essential nature of certain things only by inquiring into the kind of consciousness involved. It is, for example, quite impossible to know anything of importance about the structure of the hierarchical order of higher spiritual beings unless we concern ourselves with their consciousness. If you go through the various lecture cycles, you will see what trouble was taken to characterize the consciousness of angels, archangels, and so on. For it is essential in any study to give careful thought to what constitutes the right approach. A person might say that he is quite familiar with the hierarchical order: first comes the human being, then the higher rank of angels, then the still higher archangels, then the archai, and so on. He writes them down in ascending order and claims to understand: each hierarchy is one step above the one before it. But if that were all one knew about these beings, one would know as little about the hierarchical order as one knows about the levels of a house from the fact that each higher story is superimposed upon the one below it; one could make a drawing that would fit both cases. What really matters is to note the salient facts in the case under study. We only know something about these higher beings if we are familiar with the state of consciousness in which the various hierarchies live and if we can describe it. This must form the basis of a study of them.
The same thing holds true in the study of human beings. We know very little indeed about our inner being if we can say nothing further on the subject of the sleeping state than that our ego and astral body are outside our physical and etheric bodies. Though that is true, it is a totally abstract pronouncement, since it conveys no more information about the difference between sleeping and waking than one possesses in the case of a full and an empty beer glass; in the one case there is beer in it, and in the other the beer is elsewhere. It is true enough that the ego and the astral body have left the physical and etheric bodies of a sleeping person, but we must be of a will to go on to ever further and more inclusive concrete insights. We try to do this, for example, when we describe the alternation of interest in the two states of consciousness.
...
I wanted to demonstrate with an example how nuances of consciousness show up in life, including nuances in actions of the will and in what we do. We need to become ever more fully aware that life really must consist of such nuances, that we have to relate differences in states of consciousness to everything we do. Sleeping and waking involve very marked differences. But there can also be a nuance of consciousness in which we are aware that a matter concerns not just ourselves but the surrounding world as well; another, in which we confront the world with awareness that we must tread gently; and still another in which we know that what we do must be done with ourselves alone, or only in the most intimate circle.
The concepts and ideas we garner from spiritual science really make a difference in life. They teach us to recognize subtle subjective differences, provided we aren't disposed to know them only from the usual standpoint, realizing instead that a serious concern with spiritual science makes us a gift of this capacity for practical tact. But that serious concern with spiritual science must be present. It is of course absent if we project into spiritual science the sensations, desires, and instincts that ordinarily prevail. If that is the case, what is derived from spiritual science amounts to little more than can be garnered from any other indifferent source of learning. I've been speaking of nuances of consciousness and saying that there are nuances within the waking states very close to sleep. But it can happen that a person lacks the inclination to concern himself with certain details and subtleties, as in the case of the coupon clipper in yesterday's lecture. One may enjoy reading books or lecture cycles, but experience a dwindling consciousness at certain places in the text, and drowsiness sets in; the conscientiousness required to overcome such a condition is simply not there to call upon.
So we should pay more attention to the nuances of consciousness throughout the day, and there are many opportunities to do so. But the intellect can only gain minimal resolution on these differentiations. We need concentration, meditation, and prayer to deepen our attentional capacity so we become more intuitively aware of our variable modes of consciousness, through the sorts of exercises discussed by Steiner, OMA, Klocek, Kuhlewinde, Tomberg, and now MS on this thread. We may even begin to awaken during dreams and sleep to some extent or at least have some remembrance of the sort of consciousness we possessed during those liminal spaces of our experience. We will start to notice how the fourfold convolutions represented by the terms Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth, physical-etheric-astral-ego, fire-air-water-earth, intuition-inspiration-imagination-intellect, the four dimensions of space-time, and so forth, are still slumbering in our experience from day-to-day and can be resurrected to waking conscious experience from within. All of the esoteric texts we think through, including Cleric's posts on this forum, are simply a means of kindling our conscious intuition for that intimate inner experience. It is all symbolic in that sense.
(Salvator Mundi, Leonardo da Vinci, "Savior of the World" [by making it transparent])
